If you’d been laughed out of the Republican presidential primary three years ago for making a fool of yourself during a debate, and you wanted to be taken seriously now, you’d try an image makeover, too.

So last week when Texas Gov. Rick Perry had the gall to again come to California, a state he usually only enters on a trade mission aimed at stealing our jobs, he pulled up to a fancy San Francisco hotel driving not a Chevy pickup but a very fancy California car: an all-electric Tesla.

Since he’s trying to steal Tesla’s battery production for the Lone Star State, I guess that’s par for the course.

But he was also wearing some very hip new specs, thick-framed ones kinda like Colin Firth wore in that movie “A Single Man.” Except, wait — Firth’s character is a very gay professor. And no Texas governor would want to look so hip as to be gay, would he?

Not Rick Perry. He went on to tell the square but socially progressive members of the Commonwealth Club that he believes that homosexuality is akin to alcoholism, in that, sure, it’s a problem, but one a fella could seek treatment for.

Uh-huh. Ol’ Rick Perry sure has smartened up. He’s an entirely different candidate this time around. He’s so tuned in to the zeitgeist that he chooses San Francisco as a venue for spouting crazy talk about gay people and a quack “cure” that is illegal in California.

Here’s how it went down, according to David R. Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle: “The Texas Republican Party this month adopted a platform supporting access to ‘reparative therapy’ for gays and lesbians, a widely discredited process intended to change sexual orientation. In response to an audience question about it Wednesday night, Perry said he did not know whether the therapy worked.

“Commonwealth Club interviewer Greg Dalton then asked him whether he believes homosexuality is a disorder.

“ ‘Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that,’ Perry said. “I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.”

“The large crowd gathered at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins hotel on Nob Hill included many Perry supporters. But the comment still drew a murmur of disbelief.”

Rick Perry is not a very bright man. I’m tired of Texas governors without a lot of smarts seeking the presidency. But at this moment I’m even more tired of people and party platforms spouting unscientific nonsense, whether it’s about innate sexual orientation or climate change, and pretending it’s a legitimate personal and political point of view when it’s just dangerously wrong.